Alice Friedemann must be on the same wavelength as me. This subject of the proliferation of jellyfish caught my attention as well. Since she has done the legwork on this story, I will repost her essay below the following CBC Radio podcast with scientist Lisa-ann Gershwin:

“If jellyfish could wish for perfect conditions, these would include warming and turbid water, lack of predators and competitors, and any conditions that make it harder for other species to survive, like low oxygen or slightly more acidic water than usual. These are the very conditions we are creating at an alarming and increasing rate. And jellyfish are enjoying a renaissance like never before in history.” ~ Lisa-ann Gershwin

Alice Friedemann’s review of Stung!…

A book review of Lisa-ann Gershwin’s “Stung! On jellyfish blooms and the future of the ocean”

[ Xraymike79’s Note: The image above is purely for hyperbole. There are no jellyfish this size. The largest recorded jellyfish is the Lion’s mane jellyfish which can reach a diameter of 7 to 8 feet with tentacles 120 feet long. As Don Howe states below in the comments section: “The power of jellyfish is not in their size but in their vast numbers…”]

Move aside Steven King, jellyfish are worse than any of your demons, worse than any Grade-B monster that’s graced the silver screen. Unlike The Blob, which can be stopped by freezing, you can’t kill them. Not with chemical repellents or biocides or nets or electric shocks or introducing species that eat jellyfish like the striped sea slug. If you shoot, stab, slash, or chop off part of a jellyfish, it can regenerate lost body parts within two days. Not even the past 5 major extinction events which killed up to 90% of all life on earth, killed off the jellyfish.

Meanwhile they’re on a rampage, doing millions of dollars in damage clogging intakes of nuclear, coal, and desalination plants, killing millions of farmed fish, and destroying fishing nets with their sticky icky bodies.

The more we overfish, pollute, acidify and warm the ocean, create vast dead zones, and trawl ocean bottoms, the better the jellyfish do.

The oceans make the earth habitable for us. They generate most of the oxygen we breathe, stabilize temperatures, drive climate and weather, and absorb a third of the CO2 we’re emitting. Over 3 billion people depend on the oceans for their livelihoods; 2.6 billion depend on seafood as their main source of protein.

Most alarming of all, 40% of phytoplankton has died off globally since the 1950s – they’re not only at the base of the food chain, but they generate most of the oxygen we breathe, as well as absorb half of the carbon dioxide, and their increasing death rate will make the ocean get warmer even faster.

Why Jellyfish are taking over the world

Prolific, hard to kill, breed fast, and more – no wonder they’re so successful:

They’ve everywhere, spread around the world in ship ballast or sea currents.

Ubiquitous – from top to bottom of the ocean, from pole to pole, year-round.

Grow faster than other species to quickly take advantage of any food, and they’ll eat almost anything — copepods, fish eggs, larvae, flagellates. They eat past when they can keep consuming, spit food out, waste a great deal other creatures could have eaten. Even when they’re full, their tentacles keep capturing prey.

If there’s no food, jellyfish can consume their own body mass and get smaller and smaller until they find food again, and rapidly return to normal. Even when they grow smaller they can still reproduce.

Consume many times their body weight in high-value food but are of low-value themselves because they provide little energy, ounce for ounce, compared to the food they ate. So they have few predators.

When 2 weeks old they can lay 10,000 eggs a day that hatch 12-20 hours later

Many of them avoid predators by long vertical migrations from the deep sea to the surface at night and back down again by daylight

They can wait a long time for the right conditions to bloom

Just as plants have seeds which can endure many years waiting for optimum conditions to grow, jellyfish have a seed-like state called a polyp that waits for good conditions, and can clone themselves to create armies of ‘seeds’ waiting to burst into jellyfish blooms seemingly overnight. Polyps don’t “grow up” to become jellyfish. They spawn what we think of as jellyfish – the medusa — which then mate sexually to produce polyps, which stick to rocks, shells, man-made structures, plastic, etc. Both the polyps and the medusa could be considered “immortal” – when a polyp dies it’s clones live on, and when the medusa form of jellyfish dies, it’s pieces turn back into polyps (though I wasn’t clear if all species or just some do this).

Jellyfish are at the top of the food chain

That seems so wrong– a primitive brainless blob? But jellyfish eat much larger clams, crabs, starfish, snails, and fast, smarter fish and squid.

They’re also at the top because not much wants to eat them.

Worse yet, they outcompete other sea life by devouring the eggs and larvae of species that would have grown up to eat jellyfish larvae. It’s a double whammy since these larvae never grow up, leaving a lot more food for jellyfish to consume. A jellyfish bloom can clear the water of all eggs, larvae, copepods, and small plankton in less than a day. This makes it almost impossible for some overfished species to make a comeback.

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About xraymike79

I'm a social critic, political/cultural commentator and artist. The modern industrial world is on the cusp of great changes to our current unsustainable way of life. Most people are oblivious to the paradigm shift that will occur, but some are starting to awaken to the fact that the future will not resemble the halcyon days of the last half century in America as evidenced by the OWS movement. My objective is to highlight important news stories and find the truth that is hidden behind what Joe Bageant called the American Hologram.
www.collapseofindustrialcivilization.com

13 thoughts on “Alice Friedemann’s Book Review of Lisa-ann Gershwin’s “Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean””

So in jellyfish we have the perfect survivor, predator, and invasive species all rolled into one. They’re the earthly equivalent to the alien from the movie franchise of the same name, except that there is nothing in their physical forms that even resemble most insects, reptiles, or mammals. They’re essentially overgrown microoranisms become mindless eating and reproducing machines. On second thought, that last kinda sounds like humans.

At what point do humans realize they are the land-dwelling equivalent of the jellyfish? When the last two of us are fighting over a scrap of food at the Arctic pole?

Extra Notes from Friedemann’s book review…

“People assume that if we stop fishing, or cut back on fishing quotas, that the fish will come back. But they won’t. Why not?

Warming oceans reduce oxygen levels, making it hard for fish to respire and survive

Heavy metals and pesticides accumulate in fish tissues and kill them

Vast dead zones don’t have enough oxygen for fish to breathe, and it kills them

Oceans are acidifying from carbon dioxide, leaching calcium carbonate out of coral and other marine life skeletons

Krill depend on sea ice, which is melting – krill abundance has declined 40% per decade since 1976. Many creatures depend on krill (i.e. penguins, Emperor’s are down 50% and Adelie’s 70% because of declining krill).

Krill are also declining because we’re overharvesting them to make aquaculture feed

Krill are being replaced by copepods, which are mainly eaten by jellyfish since they’re too small for other sea life to survive on (120 times smaller than krill)

Jellyfish thrive in all of the above conditions

Jellyfish eat the eggs of fish drifting in the water – fish that might have grown up and eaten them”

Adapt – verb
1. – To make suitable to or fit for a specific use or situation.

We are busily ensuring the unsuitableness of the planet for ourselves and most life forms. There will be no adapting, only clawing for survival in a massive die-off which will eventually take everything down except for a few heat-loving microorganisms like Thermofiles.

“The ecology of oceans and how that relates to jellyfish versus fish is a complicated topic, the book is 344 pages long, I could only summarize a small part. All of what I wrote is tipping the ocean away from fish and marine mammals towards jellyfish. Part of it is that we’re turning the ocean into a low-energy food chain, which I didn’t cover in the review. A high energy food chain didn’t exist until 300 million years ago. The Ediacaran ecosystem was primarily based on a jellyfish-type ecology, with a climate perfect for them. Right now our oceans are shifting back to that state. Warm oceans favor jellyfish, low oxygen favors jellyfish, ocean acidification favors jellyfish, billions of jellyfish consuming most fish eggs, larva, and juveniles favors jellyfish, ability to catch food in murky water favors jellyfish, their ability to bloom and grow faster than any other creature, and the synergy of all of these and the other factors I listed. When this becomes a stable state, how do you get back? anyhow, Pages 288-344 delve into your question even further about why it will be hard for fish, whales, etc to return. “The Earth without us” gave me great hope for the future after the die-off, the fact we’re at peak fossil fuels means the climate change scenarios won’t be as bad as the worst forecasts perhaps; a day could come when the earth cools, oceanic oxygen and pH levels go up, and fish and sea mammals will return. If they’ve survived that is. The problem with an extinction like this 6th one we’re causing is that the hangover can last for millions of years before evolution refills the lost niches of the extinct creatures, sigh.” ~ Alice Friedemann

The reason why I may read this book is that Lisa-ann Gershwin presents her depressing subject with gallows humor, making it much more palatable than watching a Jeremy Jackson video.

Just wanted to say thanks for your interest in my book! You made my day!! Oh, and to answer your question about the immortality, you are right about the polyps, and so far only one species is known where the medusa dies and then reorganizes into polyps again. Logically, it would seem that other species probably do it too, but we have yet to identify others. Finally, I welcome thoughts that you or your readers may have toward saving the oceans and fixing the damage… the subject of my next book! Cheers, Lisa

I’m intrigued. I’m gonna buy it too.
I live in Morehead City, NC, right off the Outer Banks. Fishing and resort is what keeps this place going. Many here have ancestors going back hundreds of years, all fishermen along the banks.
You’d think there would be some concern about what we are facing, wouldn’t you? Well there isn’t. This is a very conservative are, situated between two huge Marine Corps bases. To worry about the environment is liberal, wussy, pinko shit. Al Gore stuff. No chance even getting agreement on the most accepted views of where we are headed as far as the environment and climate are concerned.
So I am getting this book and I’m going to know what I’m talking about and I’m going to bring this up to people who don’t want to hear it. They may not like it, but they need to hear it, and one day they may awaken to what is going on.
And then they will somehow blame the liberals for this mess.
Oh well.

Environmentalism, in the current period, is largely a conflict between progressive and conservative orientations. This period is also characterized by two competing sets of media, each with its own “truth.” Against that background, we progressives (as I assume most on this site are) must both guard against confirmation bias and present our positions as accurately as possible. I am inclined to accept this post but it is not well served by the inclusion of a photograph of a massive jellyfish that is neither sourced nor contextualized. In fact, the veracity of this image is the topic of some debate. I understand the desire to underscore a real environmental threat with a compelling image but visual hyperbole can have the negative side effect of compromising the entire piece. Anti-environmentalists will seize upon any pretext to delegitimize reporting they find challenging. I strongly recommend removing the image. The power of jellyfish is not in their size but in their vast numbers…

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